Andrew Mora sent me this picture asking me the identity of the car in the tv. I thought it was a rather odd photograph, but then realized it was a still from the movie Being There, one of my all-time favorites. So can you tell us the car that Chance/Chauncey is seeing?

Here’s a clip from that movie with lots of CCs:

38 Comments

Third. That looks like a Pontiac grill to me, and a GM B-body. I’m not familiar enough with the model year differences to determine the year from the picture, but 1978 would seem most likely based on when the movie was made.

The split grille does kind of shout Pontiac, my first thought. But the windshield looks too tall and narrow, rather like an early Panther. I remembered the Marquis has a split grille as well, so my guess is 1979 Mercury Marquis.

Yep- ’77-79 Bonneville. One thing bothers me on the clip. At 3:04 there’s distinctly a 1980 Grand Marquis backed into a parking space. The ’79 had smaller tail lights, the ’80 went all the way across as I recall.

Being There is a great film and really should have been Peter Sellers final movie instead of the lame The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Plus, from a CC perspective, some really great shots of seventies’ cars.

The only thing I noticed was the MISSING foreign cars. VWs and Toyotas were common everywhere in 1979, and a wide variety of other foreigners had been common in NYC for decades. Presumably the producers were trying to make a point by eliminating the foreign cars? This neighborhood is so uncool it doesn’t have the RIGHT kind of cars?

While movies are not always filmed in the city called out in the script, “Being There” was set in Washington D.C., not New York. Given the many recognizable D.C. buildings, I assume the street scenes were filmed there.

While I’m unfamiliar with the mix of domestic/imported vehicle in 1970’s D.C., I’d guess most of the politically connected folks on both sides of the aisles went with domestic to cater to the the “Buy American” vote.

I lived in suburban DC (Maryland) with my grandparents in the summers of ‘72 and ‘75. I commuted into the District almost every day to work at my grandfather’s store in the heart of downtown, in 1972, and my aunt lived in the about-to-be-famous (in ‘72) Watergate Apartments. I recall a lot of imports in DC then, and my perspective was coming from Berkeley where by this time imports outnumbered domestics. Maybe the cars in the movie weren’t local cars, but brought in, along with the extras, into areas that were controlled for the filming … perhaps loaned by local dealers for product placement.

I don’t know. The first car seen when Chance steps out of the townhouse is a junked Cadillac with no wheels/tires sitting on the pavement at the curb. My take was it was a very lower economic area of DC so one might expect to see nothing but older domestic cars from the early seventies and sixties.

That Mustang (’67-’68 fastback) with too many taillights is the reason I suspect those were real street scenes, maybe shot with a hidden camera. I can’t imagine a movie car company supplying a car that looked like that.

Since we morphed to the topic of game show giveaways, here’s a CC-worthy excerpt from the lyrics of my favorite song of about that era The Tubes’ “What Do You Want from Life”:
“a new Matador, a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego, a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a Meteor, a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu … a Maserati, a Mack truck, a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped, a Winnebago — Hell, a herd of Winnebago’s we’re giving ’em away!”

For the car on the TV screen, I’ll go with ’78 or ’79 full-sized Pontiac, but I think it is a Catalina. The Catalina’s grille was simpler than the Bonneville, with a bit less chrome and a slightly more horizontal pattern–which is how this shot looks to me. Plus “The Price Is Right” mostly gave away “value” (i.e. cheaper) cars.

One of the funniest bits was the out-take over the end credits of Peter Sellers repeatedly trying to retell his profanity-laced encounter with the young, black street thug who pulls a knife on him, to which Chance responds with his television remote.. He couldn’t get through it in the slow, Chance manner of speaking without breaking into laughter. It’s not on all copies of the movie but is on youtube.